Inspirational

You know those inspirational messages that pop up on social media? Sometimes they're a quotation from a semi-famous person, sometimes just a sentence or phrase, and your friend seems to think they contain wisdom worth sharing. Sometimes they're your friend's own wisdom they came up with themselves. Well, I've come up with one that pretty much sums up them all. No further inspirational messages need to be shared, now that we have this:

Whenever I see a message like this, some or all of these thoughts go through my head:

• That is trivial and meaningless.
• That is not even good advice.
• STOP TELLING ME HOW TO BE!
• I guess some people get inspiration from this... why do I hate everything?

I don't want to come up with specific examples because I don't want to pick on anyone. Seriously, if you get little happy neurons to fire in your brain because you feel like you understand something about life and you want to cement this feeling of "getting it" by sharing it with your friends... believe me, I understand what that's like. Have you read my blog?

But I stop myself all the time from posting little snippets of "wisdom" because I eventually think they are just as trivial, or not good advice for some reason or other, or because I don't want to tell people how to be. (And I hate everything.) As if I could get people to think more critically about the world just by telling them to.

For example, when I see trivial nonsense like the above, I want to say, "But it's human to do or feel bad things, so stop beating yourself up about it! Good and bad are meaningless social constructions anyway! What's important is to do what you do and feel what you feel! But that is just as meaningless, so don't listen to me, please carry on with your life!" So instead I say nothing.

I think most of the reason this stuff bothers me is because I don't think we need to be telling each other what's the right way to think or feel or act. There is no right way to think or feel or act. We need to stop giving each other advice and focus on understanding each other better. But of course, that is itself advice on the right way to be. I can't win!

Fuck it.

DO OR FEEL GOOD THINGS, everyone.